The Sleep Concert has been one of the dominant threads in my musical journey through life. It marked my first solo concert ever, in January 1982, in the lounge of a Stanford University dormitory. It became a sort of trademark for me, even as I explored a range of dynamic music throughout my career. Occasionally I feel an urge to return to this slow-motion core of my creative heart, and occasionally the world comes back to remind me that I will always be connected to sonic explorations at the edges of perception, trance consciousness, dreams, altered states, communal ritual. I returned to making all-night music when the Unsound Festival invited me to perform a sleep concert in Krakow Poland, October 2013. This would be my first sleep concert in ten years. I decided to create new textural soundscapes to use in this performance, to reinvigorate the concept for a new generation, a new millennium. After spending at least six months developing long evolving textures for the performance in Krakow, I proceeded to hone the material into a new long-form work, a sequel to the 7-hour long Somnium from 2001. Technical note: The Blu-ray version of 'Perpetual' contains both the 8-hour 'Perpetual' and the 7-hour original 'Somnium.' Each is divided into three chapters, split at the most quiet moments in each piece, in order to keep file sizes under 4 Gb. The audio files are stereo 16 bit 48 kHz, using over 13 Gb of the disc for audio. The remaining 11 Gb holds highly compressed video-black, required for navigation through the disc. The download of 'Perpetual' available through CD Baby is divided into ~80 minute chunks (for technical reasons due to data-entry workflow) and uses CD-resolution (16 bit 44.1 kHz) files. These should segue into each other seamlessly on your computer, although a soft click might be audible depending on the software.
